News

Shalom Lappin argues in an article published in Quillette that the digital revolution is not remaking the world in the same way as the industrial one did but is working in a fundamentally different way...

The digital revolution has rapidly led to destabilising technological change in all sorts of ways and is having a substantial and often destructive effect on political discourse, social interaction, journalism, scientific research, education, and the arts made worse by modern AI systems . "Techno-believers" and "techno-sceptics" about the nature and significance of this change are slugging it out in debate in the media and online...but is it remaking the world the same way the industrial and subsequent original technological revolution did? Shalom draws from a past study to compare how the technological revolution over the period of a century (1850-1950) compares with what is happening now from the dawn of the computer age to Large Language Model based AI (1950-1926). Over that earlier period of about a century the way people lived and the way the world works was changed completely from the way it had been for millenia. Are the current changes doing the same? The current revolution has not yet had the same kind of effect in changing the physicality of the real world at all. In that sense the changes are very different. Those earlier changes were also ultimately based on long-term thinking founded in science. The kinds of change driven by the current AI revolution are currently being driven by short term goals founded in the need for short term profits. That may well prevent it from stimulating the same kind of long term innovation. It may be changing the world but it is doing it in a very different way.

Read the article here: Myths and Illusions of the Digital Age